Life Without Pauses Is An Ongoing Train Wreck - Grasshopper

How often do we forget to pause? It's the main reason we run into so many walls, again.

The old joke comes to mind . . . Why do you keep banging your head against the wall? Because it feels good when I stop.

 

You can stop before the banging and get far fewer bruises. The remedy is the pause.

So much of our life is lived on automatic pilot. Your auto-pilot is taking you to the same destinations and will continue to do so until you willfully take the controls. That requires a pause.

 

Recognize that your automatic behavior is taking you to the same results and interrupt that behavior while it's going on. That interruption is the pause that will take you someplace new.

 

Do you know someone who speaks without pauses? I call it throwing up on people. Notice how quickly you want to be out of their company. They are headed full speed into another wall and they don't even notice until they hear and feel the "splat."

 

The sad news is that as soon as they recover from that episode, they go full throttle once again, oblivious to their damaging patterns.

 

Pausing takes some practice. This home study course will train you to avoid train wrecks. There's nothing to buy and no membership card to apply for. Just get in the habit of noticing your automatic behaviors. Some of them work for you, a lot of them don't. It's the ones that don't that need your noticing and then your pause.

 

Start paying attention to you and your behaviors. Since we are behavior machines, it's not hard to spot a few with just a little attention. Watch the behavior from start to finish. What you will notice is that it follows the same pattern every time. Your job is to interrupt the behavior in mid-track. That's the pause that will keep you from speeding down the rails and crashing into the terminal.

 

Here's a recent discovery about a verbal pattern I had. When I look directly into the sun, I sneeze. It's usually about three sneezes and afterwards I say, "Oh man." I'll bet I've been saying "Oh man" after this series of sneezes for at least half a century. That is until I noticed. After my three sneezes, I paused. I heard the words "Oh man" forming but I didn't say them. With practice, it's now gotten to the point that I don't think or say the words at all.

 

You may have an automatic behavior going on that's nothing to sneeze at. The process is exactly the same - notice and pause. It will take many repetitions to strengthen your pause muscle and the result is that your destinations will be more pleasant to visit.

 

You can stop your runaway train. Just train yourself to notice and pause.

 

All the best,

John